Windows Archive

As it turned out, Microsoft is testing the idea of adding folders to the Recommended section in Windows 11’s Start menu, giving users access to more recently added applications and suggested files. The release notes do not mention the change, and enabling it requires a third-party app called ViVeTool. I was forced to use Windows for a little while on a new laptop, and the current Start menu is an atrocious mess. Somehow I doubt adding folders to an already useless section of the Start menu is going to make it any less of a disaster.

WSL isn’t exactly my cup of tea so I know relatively little about it, but I do know it’s quite popular. This looks like a big update with a ton of new features to play around with.

The Verge: Panos Panay has always been the force behind Microsoft’s Surface line. He helped bring Surface to life as a secret project more than 10 years ago. He’s presented the new devices onstage at events, showed up at malls to promote Surface hardware, and has steered Microsoft’s Surface tablets to success in the years since. Now, he’s leaving in a surprise departure announced just days before Microsoft’s next big Surface event. Panay will no longer be presenting at Microsoft’s showcase on Thursday but will remain at the company for another couple of weeks as part of a transition process. He’s reportedly joining Amazon to replace Dave Limp and lead Amazon’s Echo and Alexa push. Amazon is also holding its own hardware event on Wednesday. This sure is an odd and rather abrupt departure – only a few days before Panay was supposed to be present Microsoft’s Surface event – and I wonder what the full story is, and if we’ll ever get to hear it. I have mixed feelings about Panay’s tenure at Microsoft. As far as hardware goes, Surface devices are quite nice and pleasant, albeit often a tad bit out of date for the prices Microsoft is asking. Worse yet, Microsoft and Panay, despite halfhearted attempts, completely missed the boat on ARM, and Windows is still floundering there due to both poor ARM hardware (compared to Apple’s offerings) and Windows on ARM being an afterthought. As far as software goes – well, Windows is in a worse state than it’s ever been in. It’s the clown car of operating systems, and two decades of layering one user interface and API above another has turned the operating system into a layer cake that makes Hisarlik seem like a thin sheet of single-ply toilet paper. The ways in which Microsoft has jerked Windows from left to right are numerous, and Panay was at the head of it all for a long time. Maybe Microsoft’s relentless push for shoving AI down Windows’ users’ throats as the straw that broke Panay’s back?

Last week, Microsoft started rolling out the modern Photos app on Windows. While the modern Photos app has several new editing tools, it removes the built-in “Video Editor” and replaces it with a web-based Clipchamp. If you’ve lost track of how many different photos applications Microsoft has shipped for Windows and what features they don’t and do have – the linked article has a good, if Microsoftian convoluted overview.

I know I keep harping on the declining quality and enshittification of Windows, but Microsoft just makes it so easy. In the changelog for the latest Windows 11 Insider Preview Builds is this gem: Beginning to roll out with this build, Chat is now Microsoft Teams – Free. Microsoft Teams – Free is pinned by default to the taskbar and can be unpinned like other apps on the taskbar. So you buy a new Windows machine or reinstall Windows, and the taskbar will have the beautiful and not at all thirsty name “Microsoft Teams – Free”. I know a good ad agency for Microsoft.

With the release of Windows 10 21H2, Windows offers inbox support for Mopria compliant printer devices over network and USB interfaces via the Microsoft IPP Class Driver. This removes the need for print device manufacturers to provide their own installers, drivers, utilities, and so on.  Device experience customization is now available via the Print Support Apps that are distributed and automatically installed via the Windows Store. This framework improves reliability and performance by moving customization from the Win32 framework to the UWP software development framework. Finally, print device manufacturers no longer have to rebuild their software since this solution is supported across all Windows versions and editions. With these advancements in the Windows print platform, we are announcing the end of servicing of the legacy v3 and v4 Windows printer drivers. As this is an impactful change, end of servicing will be staged over multiple years. Printer drivers used to be an absolute hell on Windows. Whereas on Linux you just plug the printer in and Linux will find and use the printer without much issue, on Windows, you had to trawl vendor websites using obscure device names and minor version variations just to get the right driver installed – usually accompanied by a whole boatload or crapware. Things got better as Windows eventually started downloading printer drivers and accompanying OEM management software by itself, and it seems this is the next step in the process by moving the functionality from these often crappy printer management applications into Print Support Apps.

Do you need software and hardware accelerated graphics drivers for Windows 9x running inside a virtual machine? Well, here’s SoftGPU, which will give you just that in Bochs, VirtualBox, Qemu, or VMware, for Windows 95, 98, or ME. The Github page provides detailed instructions on setting up the optimal virtual machines, and information about what, exactly, each virtual machine and diver supports and doesn’t support. On top of that, there’s links to a number of YouTube videos showing the driver in action. Excellent work, and this will allow you to get the most out of your Windows 9x virtual machines.

Cutler and his team had nearly zero experience with either OS/2 or with PCs. They did, however, have ample experience with both portable code and with varied hardware platforms. Similar to his experience at DEC, Cutler was very quickly placed as the lead of the NT project. NT needed to have some compatibility with MS-DOS, OS/2, and UNIX (all systems Microsoft supported, sold, and developed at some level at the time ). As a result, NT was a fully 32 bit microkernel operating system with paged virtual memory and the win32 API operating in protected mode with fully pre-emptive multitasking. It also had the NTVDM for MS-DOS compatibility, the win16 WOW system for older Windows compatibility, an OS/2 compatibility subsystem, and a POSIX subsystem for UNIX compatibility. For Cutler and his team, “WNT” was the working name for the OS (increment each letter by one from VMS). The similarities between VMS and NT are striking. The VMS Interrupt Priority Level became the Interrupt Request Level in NT, the Asynchronous System Trap became the Asynchronous Procedure Call, a Fork Procedure became the Deferred Procedure Call, while some other terminology was copied verbatim. NT and VMS share similarities in many ways, but unlike VMS, NT processes can contain more than one thread of execution, NT uses access control lists for object security, NT uses its own NTFS, and NT uses the registry (a centralized hierarchical configuration database) allowing the configuration of computers over a network, among many other major differences. Dave Cutler has had such a massive impact on the world of computing, yet relatively few people know his name or are aware of his accomplishments. He still works at Microsoft today, and has worked on both Azure and Xbox One’s hypervisor.

Microsoft is testing an incredibly welcome feature in Notepad. With this update, Notepad will start automatically saving your session state allowing you to close Notepad without any interrupting dialogs and then pick up where you left off when you return. Notepad will automatically restore previously open tabs as well as unsaved content and edits across those open tabs. Saved session state does not impact any of your files, though, and it is still your choice whether to save or discard unsaved changes to files anytime you close a tab. You can turn this feature off in app settings if you would prefer to have a fresh start every time you open Notepad. I’m not exactly impressed by Microsoft’s handling of Windows as of late, but the few things they are doing right are the more frequent, sometimes constant updates to core applications like Notepad, the terminal, and so on. Features like these are table stakes in better-managed platforms like GNOME or KDE, but it’s welcome to see Windows play catch-up, if at least when it comes to a notepad application.

Currently, in Windows 11, links contained in Windows system components, like, say, in the Settings application, are always opened in Edge, completely disregarding your default browser setting. Well, thanks to the European Union’s new Digital Services Act, this is going to change – but only for users in the European Economic Area. The latest Insider Preview changelog states: In the European Economic Area (EEA), Windows system components use the default browser to open links. It’s remarkable how quickly things can change when the full might of the EU’s and member states’ legal systems can come bearing down on you if you don’t comply. We’re already seeing the first few signs of users in the EU getting a better experience than users elsewhere.

Microsoft has just paused Bing ads targeting Chrome users who have set Google as the default search engine. Windows 11 (and 10) users are seeing more Bing and Edge of late, and the most recent ad appears on top of games as the tech giant trying to push folks to use Bing rather than Google search in Chrome. As I reported on Sunday, Microsoft aggressively pushed Bing to Chrome users with Google or other search engine as default. This campaign involved a pop-up on the desktop’s lower right side, hovering above all apps and games. The advert reminded users of the benefits of using Bing, such as AI chat and Microsoft Rewards. People will keep using this garbage, so why would Microsoft no spam Windows users with ads? It’s not like Windows users care.

Meanwhile, if you are on Windows 11 and wondering about its compatibility with your system, a document from Intel, spotted by Twitter (X) user Chi11eddog, seemingly confirms that Windows 11 is going to be supported. And although the document does not mention Windows 12, which is expected given that the product has not even been officially announced yet (Microsoft recently revealed the release date for Windows 11 23H2). While this is certainly expected, users who would have stuck to their Windows 10 PCs, either due to the hardware being not on the support list or simply because they prefer the older OS over the new ones, are likely going to be out of luck as the supported OS does not mention Windows 10. I mean, at the time Wi-Fi 7 comes out, Windows 10 will be almost a decade old. I’m all for a good Microsoft thrashing, but expecting them to go back and add support for Wi-Fi 7 to a decade-old operating system seems a bit unrealistic.

Despite all of the litigation, Windows 2 made it to market, gained 3rd party support, and signaled a massive transition in computing that all of the competition had failed to do. With Windows 2, millions of people were using a graphical desktop with graphical applications. The mouse was made a standard tool. PCs were now being urged to adopt powerful graphics adapters. Many people claim Windows 2 to be a failure, but this is not an accurate assessment. While it didn’t sell to the level of later releases, the market hadn’t really become accustomed to buying an operating system on a store shelf. People typically received an OS as part of a computer purchase. That Microsoft was able to sell over 2 million copies of Windows 2 shows a serious change; MS-DOS’s days were now numbered. I’ve always considered Windows 1.0 and 2.0 to be false starts, failed attempts at what would become Windows 3.x. This article makes the case that Windows 2.0 was more important and successful than we give it credit for today.

Unfortunately for me, I couldn’t just let this one go. I tested all the popular Windows uninstallers and I didn’t like what I saw. I thought many of these programs had some rudimentary issues with their user interface, and they just didn’t work that well. How difficult could it really be to do something better? As it turned out, it was very difficult, actually. It’s 2023, and Windows users still cannot centrally manage their software. People have to create multiple uninstaller programs to finally make a decent one, and not only does it need to uninstall applications, it also needs to somehow find all the garbage files and registry keys these applications barf all over the system. We deserve so much better than this trash.